What research says about hyperbaric oxygen (HBOT)
Performance, healthy ageing and the cell: an overview of recent studies on oxygen under increased pressure in athletes and healthy older adults.
Hyperbaric oxygen is not a new idea, but research into what it does in healthy people is growing fast. This article brings together the key studies. You will find every source, with a summary, in our research library.
What happens in a hard chamber
In a hard chamber you breathe oxygen at increased pressure, usually around 2.0 ATA. At that pressure more oxygen dissolves in the blood plasma than under normal conditions. Researchers mainly look at what repeated sessions in a fixed protocol do over time.
Performance in athletes and older adults
In a randomised study with 37 master athletes aged 40 to 50, researchers compared 40 sessions at 2.0 ATA with a sham protocol (Hadanny et al., 2022). The HBOT group showed a higher VO2max and higher oxygen uptake at the anaerobic threshold, together with changes in the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell.
The same research group also studied 63 sedentary adults over 64 (Hadanny et al., 2024). After sixty sessions in twelve weeks, VO2max per kilogram was higher and blood flow and blood volume in the heart muscle had increased.
Healthy ageing
Several studies in healthy older adults used the same protocol of sixty daily sessions:
- Cognition: in a randomised study with 63 healthy adults, attention and processing speed improved most (Hadanny et al., 2020).
- Telomeres: in immune cells, researchers measured longer telomeres and fewer senescent T cells (Hachmo et al., 2020).
- Skin: skin biopsies showed more collagen, longer elastic fibres and more small blood vessels (Hachmo et al., 2021).
A 2026 systematic review puts these studies side by side and describes the results in healthy older adults as promising (Mohammadi et al., 2026).
What this means in practice
The studies use fixed protocols: a set pressure, a set oxygen level and a fixed number of sessions. Choosing a system therefore also means choosing a way of working. That is why, for every project, we discuss which protocol, which chamber and which guidance suit your users.
The studies mentioned were carried out by independent researchers and published in scientific journals. We present them in abridged form and for information only; the original publication prevails. All sources are listed in our research library.
Would you like to experience it yourself? Book a session in our showroom in Goes or view the hard hyperbaric chambers.
